Reviews - Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

753 reviews for:

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

Kyle Chayka

3.79 AVERAGE

zafromspace's review against another edition

4.75

informative reflective medium-paced

This book rewired my brain. It put to words the the kind of anxiety I’ve been feeling for the last couple of years about my online life and the way we as a society have been experiencing the world. Certainly it’s taught me to be a lot more thoughtful about how and why I’m consuming online content and the need to incorporate more Lo-fi and analog media and culture into my life.

Missing the .25 stars only because there were certain points that felt repetitive. Also because of the truly mind boggling amount of times the word “nascent” was used. I didn’t keep count, but it was noticeably a lot.

lauralhart's review against another edition

DID NOT FINISH: 55%

dnf at 55%. like others, i had high hopes for this, but i was disappointed by how much of this i already knew / felt obvious, especially for someone who is pretty online. at about 30% the book started to seem repetitive, and i stuck it out a little longer to see if we’d move past that into something more interesting or surprising. unfortunately, we didn’t. this certainly could’ve been an engaging essay, but it didn’t need to be a book.

evnegia's review against another edition

2.5

reflective medium-paced

I'm not sure who this alwas written for, but it wasn't me. The author bemoans the sameness of algorithmicly determined taste, but I've literally never heard of the influencers he mentions. There is diversity in the feed. He glosses over the fact that trends in culture pre-date the internet by claiming human curators are inherently better than algorithms with no notes on the racism/sexism/classism that are baked into who gets to be a tastemaker and what they promote. He put too much of himself in this book to be this unreflective on his perspective and privelage.